“It is all too easy to be cynical when movie stars turn to theatre,” said Houman Barekat in The New York Times, especially as some have not proved very good at it.
Cate Blanchett, however, is a stage veteran; and in Thomas Ostermeier’s “ingenious” production of Chekhov’s “The Seagull” – a new version adapted by Ostermeier and playwright Duncan Macmillan – she dazzles as Irina Arkádina, the vain, attention-seeking actress, said Sarah Hemming in the Financial Times. Blanchett tap dances, and at one point even does the splits, as she “mischievously splices her own fame with that of her character”.
As promised, Ostermeier and Macmillan have blown away the dust surrounding the 1895 drama, said Sarah Crompton on What’s on Stage. Characters are in modern dress; they vape and swear; one arrives on stage on a quad bike and performs a Billy Bragg song, which he dedicates to Ostermeier. But the most surprising thing about the evening is “just how serious and sensitive it is in unpicking both the comic and tragic notes in Chekhov’s study of a group of unhappy, arty, self-obsessed people who can’t make any sense of their lives in a time of crisis”. It “deliberately circles issues of artifice and reality, of true feelings and performance, of the very purpose of art, enfolding the audience in its examination”.
Blanchett “may be the glitteriest” casting, as the actress who finds her real self impossible to face, but she is part of a “powerhouse ensemble” that ultimately “outshines her in intensity”, said Arifa Akbar in The Guardian: Emma Corrin as actress Nina Zaréchnaya, Tom Burke as writer Alexander Trigorin, and Kodi Smit-McPhee as Arkádina’s son all excel.
Yet for those of us who don’t love Ostermeier’s style, it proved a long night, said Clive Davis in The Times. The German director’s “battery of well-worn devices” – microphones, actors breaking the fourth wall – are all present and correct.
And over three hours, his “terror of being conventional” does become pretty wearisome, said Robert Gore-Langton in The Mail on Sunday. By the bitter end, this Seagull has “become a half-dead parrot. Albeit one with a dream cast.”